ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts blog seeks to bring together all levels of project management and business analysis expertise, from diverse industries and perspectives, across business groups and information technology. Our goal is build successful collaboration and share content, best practices, techniques, and networking.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Today, businesses require effective business analysis in
order to maintain competitiveness. Effective business analysis involves taking
information from sources and analyzing for the purpose of forecasting future
trends, finding ways to make improvements in business strategies, improving operations,
and making smart decisions to improve the bottom line. Understanding key
marketing areas is essential to helping to generate revenue and cut down
excess.

Business analysis can include market research analysis like
analyzing consumer data from transaction records, consumer surveys, polls, financial
analysis, inventory analysis, product and service analysis, and more. Business
analysis helps a business avoid making bad decisions that can result in time
and money being wasted. The result of finding the right solution the first time
is projects get completed in a timely manner, strategies are executed with
beneficial results, and there is effective monitoring of the project resulting
in the best outcome.

Effective business analysis allows managers to make sure
information is distributed and understood by the project team. Then the team is
able to work together in an efficient manner to create a plan that has a high
chance of success. Due to changing demographics and consumer habits, it is
important that a business understands current and future trends in order to
meet changing consumer preferences. In the competitive market, you cannot run a
successful business without understanding your customers and all facets of the
company.

According to Nancy Nee, PMP, PMI-ACP, CBAP, CSM, Vice
President of Global Product Strategy, ESI International, requirements in the
form of a user story are all about the business analyst being able to focus on delivering
convergence versus collaboration and consensus. The new trend of collaboration and consensus is a way to get everybody on the same page,
but it takes a long time to be able to get those requirements developed.

“Remember, in agile from a BA’s perspective user stories are
supposed to be there to deliver value that provide a way for everybody to
converge on the same path so that you can deliver every four to six weeks. That’s
the package and the focus of what agile is all about,” she explained.

In 2013, Nee thinks we will begin to see that the BA’s are
going to need to focus their elicitation skills more on convergence than on consensus.
A way to get there is to leverage their ability in focusing on collaboration and
choosing the elicitation methods that will bring everybody into that
convergence path.

Whether you are looking to sharpen your toolkit, grow as a
leader or benchmark against peers by exchanging stories of success and failure,
this event delivers it all – providing you with more credits than any other
event of its kind. With a huge network
of experts and peers to connect with, you'll be prepared to confront the
Increasing complexity even more confidently with dexterity and agility.